Archive for October, 2006

Shenzhen, Day 3

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

Today we had dinner at Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was a distressing experience. They had this pitiful replacement for coleslaw that was yellow. Yes, sickly pus yellow. Ugh.

When Morons Design

I spent the whole 11 hours (!) at work wrestling with a Flash applet and the accompanying PHP/database backend. It’s an absolutely drop dead dumb piece of crap.

It basically allows video conferencing. Now, the main problem with it is this:

  1. Alice starts up the applet, and she waits for the other party to connect
  2. Bob connects and they have a conference session
  3. Now, Bob disconnects and goes on his way
  4. Until Alice explicitly clicks “End conference” she is considered to be unavailable with her status set to “In a conference”.

Smart eh? Obviously someone was half-asleep when he dreamed this system up. Oh and get this — the database table uses two rows to store Alice and Bobs conference status - this is what leads to Alice being tied up. When Bob disconnects, his row is removed, but no no, not Alice! Nooooo! she has to wait her turn. Idiots.

Before anyone even suggests it, no it’s not a feature. It’s a recognised bug.

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Shenzhen, Day 2

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

Yesterday, I was rather disgusted to discover that the sun rises at 6.25am… I discovered this at precisely 6:35am, after which I was unable to sleep. The weather here is interesting — it’s dry, and cool (25C on average apparently) and it never seems to rain.

Apart from that, no real surprises. It really doesn’t feel all that different, except for the traffic. This still shocks me — people here seem to obey only one traffic rule: drive on the right side of the road. Most of the time.

I expected to see more bicycles here for some reason, but walking seems to be the trend — all my colleagues live within walking distance of the office, and they seem to spend most of their time there. The working hours here are 9am-8pm. 11 hours, and people actually stay and work late. Insanity I tell you. No one goes out for lunch either — they all order in, eat quickly and resume work.

I confirmed today that I do indeed live in the clubbing strip of the city. It’s somewhat hard to tell with all the signs being in Chinese, and there being very normal facades hiding the clubs…

Apart from food (dinner/lunch) I’ve only purchased one thing — a Heineken six-pack . This was at Foong’s suggestion — I said that I needed to get a cereal drink (like Nestum) that I could drink in the mornings, and in reply he proceeded to walk over to the alcohol section of the supermarket we were in. He will pay for this.

On Receipts

There are apparently two kinds of receipts here — official, and unofficial. You have to specifically request these official receipts, which are the only receipts recognised by offices. They come in predetermined values, and have to be acquired from an official source… Most quaint.

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Greetings from 深圳

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

Last night I arrived in Shenzhen, China for work. This is as good a reason as any to start up my online journal again… so shrug here goes.

We took the 6:46pm flight out of Malaysia to Hong Kong. After that, it was a car ride across the border to China, and then to Shenzhen.

At every single immigration checkpoint I got stopped and checked… I think this is because I was the only ‘foreign’ looking one in our group — my two colleagues are Chinese.

Finally, after a crazy taxi ride (I counted three almost killed cyclist and pedestrians), we arrived outside our apartment building at about one in the morning. My boss (Loh) then declares that he must now run off and get the key from our office… So I end up standing around with luggage and my colleague, Foong. The upside to that was that it gave me plenty of time to look at the surrounding area . It appears that I live in the area where all the pubs/clubs are:

From Our Condo

Finally, he returned with the key and we went upstairs to the apartment — very strange layout, but I have my own room and hot water, so all is good. At about two in the morning we went out for dinner… and that pretty much sums up my first ‘night’ there.

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